Canadian Musician's Mike Raine Interviewed by FYI Music News about Streaming Revenue

Canadian music industry website FYI Music News has published an interview with Canadian Musician Assistant Editor Michael Raine regarding music streaming revenue in Canada, which Mike investigated in his latest feature article for Canadian Musician.

The article, titled “Streaming Money is Flowing… But Where To?” can be found in the new September/October 2016 issue of Canadian Musician, which you can see HERE.

Michael Raine, a Humber journalist post-grad, has been the assistant editor of*Canadian Musician* since 2012. He recently did some legwork to try and figure out where the proceeds of the streaming services ended up. You can read his article [here.](http://canadianmusician.com/features/archives/85)

Below, is a conversation between Nick Krewen, on behalf of FYI, and Mr. Raine about his article, Streaming Money Is Flowing… But Where To?

FYI: It seems that with streaming, record contracts are more convoluted these days…

Michael Raine: When I was speaking to entertainment lawyers Paul Sanderson and Safwan Javed, it wasn’t that they were more convoluted, but the terminology is broad enough that they’re using the old terminology to apply to what essentially is a completely new medium. The idea that record contracts, on the major label side, are still broken down into two revenue streams – the licensing and the sales – that have two very different splits as far as what’s going to the artist and what’s going to the label. On average, it seems that the licensing revenue is split 50/50 between the label and the artist, which is obviously fair. It’s on the sales side that things are split heavily in favour of the label. The odd part is just this idea of streaming, which on the surface, seems closer to a licensing that it does to a traditional sales paradigm. But that’s being included as sales, and therefore, that’s the reason why so much of that revenue is going to the labels and not really making its way to the artist.

Download sales are decreasing – and that’s largely because of streaming. So, not unjustifiably, record companies are saying, because streaming is taking away our sales revenue, we’re going to consider streaming sales, not licensing. In the article, Paul Sanderson mentions the Eminem case of his publishing company (F.B.T. Productions, LLC) suing Aftermath Records over download royalties. Eminem and his company won that case (Ed. note – courts ruled that Aftermath owed F.B.T. a royalty rate of 50% on downloads and ringtones under the “Masters Licensed” provision) and Paul says the record companies took that as a warning. From that point forward, they made sure to make very clear in their contracts that they were going to include digital revenue sales.

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